At Thu, 26 Mar 2009 16:04:06 -0400 CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org wrote:
nate wrote:
Agile Aspect wrote:
Hi - I've been asked to re-partition a
Dell 120 GB 5400 RPM Encrypted Serial ATA Hard Driveand install CentOS 5 on the new partition.
It's a Dell Lattitude E5400 laptop.
Is this even possible with encrypted drives?
How is it encrypted? Some new laptops come with drive encryption built into the hardware which I believe is totally transparent to the OS, sample device: http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/datasheet/disc/ds_momentus_5400_fde_3.pdf
Looking at this: http://accessories.dell.com/sna/products/Internal_Hard_Drives/productdetail....
The drive they have seems similar, so I would expect re-partitioning to work fine, though of course backup any important data before trying.
nate
Excuse a really dumb question, how does this provide me with security? I assume it still uses the normal SATA interface and thus the OS writes to the drive as normal, but now it is encrypted onto the physical media..... so now I steal the laptop, or just the physical drive, plug it into my SATA controller and voila read all the encrypted data off the drive??? I am obviously missing something - there must be a key somewhere off the drive for this to work as a securely encrypted system. Flumoxed!
From what little I gathered from the promo PDF, there was some mumbling
about the BIOS. I'm guessing that the drive somehow requests a passkey during system startup somehow. But this is only a guess.
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